The numbers paint a stark picture: blogging has changed, but the blogging scene is in some ways in better shape than it was three years ago.

Highlights from the report include the following:

• Total reader engagement has grown 30% year over year or 69% total for the top 1,000 feeds, which includes blogs and mainstream news sites.

For 100,000 randomly selected blog posts in each of 2007, 2008 and 2009...

• Engagement on-site has grown in absolute terms but the share of total engagment that happens on-site vs. off-site has dropped 50%.


• Trackbacks have fallen from 19% of engagement to 3% of engagement.


• Engagement on social networks like but not limited to Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook has grown from 1% to over 29% of total engagement. The Postrank staff admitted that this was a surprisingly low number but said that in aggregate there is still a whole lot of activity going on outside social networks.



• Segmenting from the last amount of effort required up to the most, reader engagement now looks like this: 29% is link-sharing on social networks, 29% is bookmarking or voting on sites like Delicious, Digg and Reddit, 38.5% is comments on or off-site and trackbacks are now 3% of engagement. "Trackbacks are taking a nose dive," Postrank CTO Ilya Grigorik told us by phone, "bookmarking sites have consistently gone down over the last 3 years, but voting on sites like Digg or Reddit has grown."


• Perhaps most significantly, blog posts now have a longer life span. In 2007 tracked posts saw 94% of engagement within the first day and 98% of that first day's engagement happened within the first hour. In 2008 that number fell to 83% within the first day and in 2009 it was a mere 64%. Thus Postrank concludes that 36% of reader engagement in the top blogs happens after 1 day. "While the real-time web is all about lowering the latency," Grigorik says, "the pervasive nature and number of people engaged in their communities and conversations (the Social Web) is helping with information discovery. People are worried that the real-time web will destroy their readership as everyone just gets distracted by the newest shiny thing on Twitter, but the numbers show something very different. It's so easy to spread information now that it lasts longer and finds more niches - this trend is helping content travel further."

If you can't make it to Mountain View, California in eight days, get ready to watch selected sessions streamed live online (thanks to Justin.tv). This isn't going to be talking-heads pushing their products on stage, this is going to be a high-value brainstorming, networking and collaborative learning. Check out the companies below; they are bringing financial support to this important gathering to talk together about the future of the internet.

Now check out these fabulous sponsors.

Enterprise

TIBCO

TIBCO's technology digitized Wall Street in the '80s with its event-driven "Information Bus" software, which helped make real-time business a strategic differentiator in the '90s. Today, TIBCO's infrastructure software gives customers the ability to constantly innovate by connecting applications and data in a service-oriented architecture, streamlining activities through business process management, and giving people the information and intelligence tools they need to make faster and smarter decisions.

Filtering

PostRank

PostRank offers a website and developer tools that make sense of social engagement data on the web. Want to discover the bloggers with the most reader-engagement or the blog posts that are hottest, in any niche? PostRank will do that for you, in real time. Whether you're a very large company or an individual blogger, PostRank can do things for you that no one else can. We at ReadWriteWeb like and use PostRank a lot.

Search

Faroo

Faroo is a P2P real-time search engine that combines explicit and implicit data to power its indexing and ranking technologies. The company specializes in difficult real-time analysis of international content, like breaking up long strings of Chinese characters for text analysis.

Publishing

WordPress

WordPress is one of the world's leading blog publishing services and software. WordPress made free real-time updates from millions of blogs available last month.

Aggregation

Nomee

Nomee is an application to manage the most important parts of your digital life. The Nomee desktop client aggregates activity updates from more than 120 different sites that your friends and favorite public figures are using, filters those streams and lets you view media in a beautiful interface.

These sponsors have made an important move in supporting the Real-Time Web Summit so please check out their products. If you're interested in sponsoring the event as well, it will be worth your while. Contact sales@readwriteweb.com for info.

Please join us for this important conversation on October 15th in Mountain View, California and streaming live online.

The same API used for ranking by the AdAge 150 and the Atlantic Monthly's new political blogger leaderboard is thus now generally available. Determining the most-closely watched bloggers on niche topics is something a lot of people want to do for a wide variety of reasons - when that determination can be made programatically you can jump into the center of a conversation quickly.

Some good sample lists are Postrank CTO Ilya Grigorik's favorite a href="http://www.postrank.com/user/igrigorik/topic/cloud">cloud computing blogs or the general list of top design blogs. The new APIs will make it easy to build lists around any topic or group and display that data on other sites.

Blogsearch data has been a consistent problem for PostRank, both Technorati and Google Blogsearch data has been inconsistent for the company. PostRank says it will be launching its own trackback discovery service shortly.

While some meme-tracking services struggle with niches where blogs don't heavily link to eachother, PostRank says that by tracking multiple forms of user interaction it has captured data that closely resembles what can be found from services tracking absolute web traffic to individual sites.

Last month PostRank released a new analytics tool that displays social media engagement on top of Google Analytics data. The new APIs will allow 1000 requests a day for free for noncommercial use, commercial licenses are available as well.

Disclosure: PostRank is a sponsor of the forthcoming ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit. It's also one of our favorite services on the web.

We want to take a moment to highlight five international companies that will be at the Summit. We really appreciate the distance they are traveling to help make this event an important one. You can learn about more highlighted participants signed up so far on this page and you can sign up to join us here.

Faroo (UK)

Faroo is a P2P real-time search engine that combines explicit and implicit data to power its indexing and ranking technologies. The company specializes in difficult real-time analysis of international content, like breaking up long strings of Chinese characters for text analysis. Faroo is also a sponsor of the Real-Time Web Summit, so they are helping it happen as well as helping its international relevance!

PostRank (Canada)

PostRank provides social media analytics on top of traditional web content analytics. We've written about PostRank over and over again here (we're going to again later today) and we use their technology every day. We're very excited that PostRank is going so strong that it's a major sponsor of the Summit as well.

Mendeley (UK)

Mendeley Research Networks is a fascinating real-time citation tracking, recommendation and organization tool for scientific research papers. It's backed by founders of Last.fm and Skype. It's like Last.fm for scientific research. The company believes it is on a pace to have the largest online repository of academic articles in the world sometime next year.

Twingly (Sweden)

Twingly offers blog search, trackback discovery and comment aggregation in real time. The company already has a thriving business providing real-time inbound links for European newspapers and just launched a new product called Twingly Channels this week. (Watch this space for a review later today.)

Sysomos (Canada)

Some of these companies are bringing multiple representatives and we hope that even more international participants will sign up in the next two weeks leading up to the event. To register to join these companies and many more at the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit, please visit this link. Feeling unable to make it? Make sure to put the event down on your calendar anyway, we'll be broadcasting select discussion sessions live via Justin.tv. See you on the 15th!

On its overview page, PostRank will display standard metrics like total page views, a PostRank engagement score and, optionally, the number of Twitter followers you have. PostRank Analytics also offers a wide range of additional features, ranging from daily 'Concierge' emails with a summary of your blog's engagement activity to very detailed reports about specific posts.

The most interesting data can be found under the 'analyze' tab. Here, you can see a mashed-up view of all the posts on your blog and drill down to specific metrics for every post. PostRank aggregates data from all the major social networks and sharing sites like Twitter, Facebook, delicious, Reddit, and digg. In addition, it also uses BackType to track conversations around posts and displays traditional metrics like number of unique visitors and bounce rates from Google Analytics.

Most of the info in PostRank Analytics can obviously be found for free on the Internet already, but getting an aggregate view of all of this data definitely gives you a new way to track engagement around your blog posts. PostRank Analytics is obviously not an enterprise-class social media tracking service like Radian6 or Sysyomos' MAP and Heartbeat, but for $9 a month, it provides a lot of value to publishers who are looking for a convenient way to track engagement around their posts across a multitude of services.

Gnip, the Boulder, Colorado startup aiming to act as a clearinghouse for user activity updates from around the web, announced a partnership today with Canadian firm PostRank, to offer additional versions of Gnip-delivered data feeds, filtered by popularity. Gnip could already deliver anyone a big bucket of user data like photos from Flickr, submissions from Digg or slide shows from SlideShare - but now this partnership will allow customers the option of receiving only those items that were most commented on, linked-to, tweeted about, etc. It's wonky, but it's a whole lot of fun.

We use Postrank around the ReadWriteWeb team often: to make sure we don't miss big stories on niche blogs, to display the most recent break-out hits on other blogs we write about and to power the Community Management Aggregator that automatically delivers the hottest posts from community management experts to customers of our Guide to Online Community Management.

Imagine a system for delivering only high-value information via Twitter. That's what PostRank has built with its new PostRank Twitter Newsroom. The system finds the most engaging blogs on various topics, then automatically pulls the most talked-about posts from those blogs and now delivers those links to you via Twitter.

We're big fans of PostRank here at ReadWriteWeb. The service takes inbound RSS feeds and scores each item in those feeds by number of comments, inbound links, mentions on Twitter, saves in Delicious, votes on Digg and other feedback metrics. It then allows you to subscribe to the 10% of the items in any feed that are most popular with that blog's own community of readers. It's an awesome way to keep track of the break-out hits on any topic, from any source.

Now PostRank has taken the next step and discovered the blogs about various topics that are most "engaging" with their own readers. For 50 topics at launch and more in the future, the PostRank Newsroom now aggregates the most talked about posts on the most engaging topical blogs and delivers them to subscribers on Twitter.

Want to get the hottest posts from the top blogs in law, marketing, music, nonprofits or programming in Ruby sent to you by Twitter? Now you can. That's a valuable service.

The editorial selection to determine which blogs are in which categories is open to question. We're not sure why we're in Entrepreneurship, for example, and not startups or tech. And we're not sure that the full Digg front page feed is suitable for the Mac category - but hopefully these things will get worked out with reader feedback.

It's similar to something we did last year for the DEMO event, where instead of racing a bunch of other blogs to cover all the startups at DEMO we grabbed their RSS feeds, filtered for the word DEMO, ran them through PostRank and then put that feed into a Twitter account that people could subscribe to. It worked pretty well, so we expect this new implementation from the company will work as well or better.

In this case the links are published from well explained Twitter accounts, with hashtags. We expect people will retweet them and it will be a great way to spread the word about PostRank.

Twitter for high-value information? It might be hard for some people to believe - but this kind of machine processing to add value to people-published content is exactly the kind of development we expect to define the next phase of the web.

You can find ReadWriteWeb on Twitter, as well as the entire RWW Team: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Bernard Lunn, Alex Iskold, Sarah Perez, Frederic Lardinois, Rick Turoczy, Sean Ammirati, Lidija Davis and Phil Glockner.

What PostRank has created with the Discovery Engine, though, is completely fresh. This is a new function that the site brings to those looking to find new, great content online. Simply use the search bar at the top of the main page to look for a topic, user name (mine is eng1ne), or feed address. If you choose a topic, for example Twitter, you will be directed to a list of feeds centered around that topic. You can open each feed and look at some of the most popular posts in the feed, and choose to subscribe to it if you like it (requires free login).

Once you have done this a few times, you will have a list of feeds that you can then look at in your favorite feed reader. Once over in the subscriptions area, you can choose what quality of article you prefer seeing for each feed (from all to best). You can also assign your own topics to your feeds, which automatically organizes the feeds into topic lists, like my topic list of Austin blogs. At this point, you can subscribe to this custom feed by topic. Your resulting feed will be a combined river of all the different sources in that topic list.

Finally, PostRank has added a Toluu-like social component where you can discover other people using the service, and choose to follow them and check out what feeds they are subscribed to. The PostRank discovery engine keeps track of how popular feeds are getting, and will take that in to account for their placement in the topic lists as well.

Overall, PostRank has taken a very effective system for selecting only the best content in the topic areas you are interested in, and added a personal curation aspect in the form of users interacting with the system, causing popularity to affect the rankings of the feeds. The only problem is, you may choose to use PostRank feeds to escape too much noise, and end up drowning in quality content instead!

PostRank is one of our very favorite services on the web today. Give it any RSS feed and the service will give you a filtered feed of just the most commented on, linked to, saved and Dugg posts from that feed. It's really handy, so we're excited to see what the company can do moving more seriously into the feed publishing and analytics market. Can PostRank pull it off? Below we discuss reasons why they may or may not be able to do so.

We use PostRank every day here at ReadWriteWeb, for everything from finding the weirdest stuff on the internet to tracking the hottest conversation among GenY, semantic web or mobile blogs.

The company says it "will be releasing a collection of products over a period of the next six months related to [feed analytics]: helping publishers and readers discover topic experts and measure their influence, engagement analytics (social media analytics), real-time tracking and other tools to help publishers and readers find and read what matters."

Can They Pull it Off?

The main asset PostRank has going for it is that there's a very clear value proposition. We've found that it takes one sentence to explain what this service does and nearly anyone who uses RSS immediately grasps the value of the application and wants it. That's quite remarkable considering how hard it is to explain most things about RSS.

FeedBurner got huge piles of users by saying "go through us and we'll tell you how many RSS subscribers you have." PostRank can tell potential users "go through us and we'll tell you what your hottest posts are, who the most loved writers are in your field, and what topics are burning up the charts." And hopefully, how many subscribers you have.

The Challenges PostRank Will Face

There are a lot of challenges that PostRank will face in trying to replace FeedBurner.

Will Google Reader, now the dominant RSS reader by far, report subscriber numbers to PostRank? FeedBurner requires RSS readers to report numbers daily, something that doesn't always work. Now that FeedBurner is owned by Google, will they hand over their huge part of the numbers to a competitor?

Far more processing power is required to count comments, inbound links, etc. for every blog post in an RSS feed. When PostRank came out with a Google Reader and Newsgator plug-in, for example, it limited its filtering to just the most popular 1,000 blogs on the web.

It's more complicated to evaluate "social media engagement" than it is subscribers, and evaluating subscribers is fairly complicated itself. How many people are still mystified by the way FeedBurner numbers rise and fall daily, or by the obtuse "reach" metric that FeedBurner now emphasizes? Similarly, PostRank appears fairly transparent on the surface, but a closer look at their metrics leaves us feeling more in the dark than we'd like to be.

It hasn't been a bump-free ride so far, either. Some issues encountered so far include; finding feed URL irregularities, catching strategies that didn't work out, and server troubles. As a result, we find ourselves contacting PostRank on a regular basis to report problems. We also subscribe to the feed of their GetSatisfaction forum and we know we're not the only ones. In their defense, the company has raised more money lately so they could be better prepared for the load. This author also used PostRank on a major public production for a large consulting client 6 months ago and that worked quite well.

Finally, will publishers trust another 3rd party feed publishing service to stand between them and their readers? Some blogs have reported no problems of late with FeedBurner, but a quick search on Twitter shows that many others have.

We're excited to see what PostRank can do, though. If you are too, then drop by the company's new Feed Analytics page and share your ideas and feature requests for a feed analytics service of the future.

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/could_feedburner_be_replaced_by_postrankcom_redux.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/could_feedburner_be_replaced_by_postrankcom_redux.php RSS & Feed Management Sun, 05 Apr 2009 15:00:00 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick One of the more popular panels at SXSW Interactive this year was one called Beyond Aggregation. The panel included our very own Marshall Kirkpatrick, as well as Gabe Rivera (Techmeme), Louis Gray (LouisGray.com), Melanie Baker (PostRank) and Micah Baldwin (Lijit). The topics revolved around information gathering and management.

From the panel, Marshall and Louis had new sources and gathering tips, Gabe and Melanie weighed in heavily on how to manage information and Micah had some great suggestions on discovery of new information sources.

]]>Sponsor

]]> Here are some highlights from the panel. I have grouped all the comments together by panelist.

Marshall Kirkpatrick

Twitter - FriendFeed

• Marshall focused on using tools like FriendFeed, combined RSS feeds and Google Custom Search Engines (CSEs) to find the news he needs.
• He highlighted a post he wrote entitled How to Find the Weirdest Stuff on the Internet that describes how to use free tools to create a mashup that finds unique content.  It uses tag clouds in Delicious, finds culture blogs, filters that output through PostRank, then finally pushes it through Feedburner.
• Finally, Marshall returned to how CSEs can work in conjunction with drag and drop zones to quickly search for content online.

Louis Gray

Twitter - FriendFeed

• He uses Google Reader as his primary info-gathering tool. 
• He shares his content from Google Reader to other resource sites such as Delicious, Friendfeed, and Twitter.
• Louis uses FriendFeed to find trusted sources for news and content.
• He pointed out the DailyRadar network of sites like MacBlips and GadgetBlips that aggregate more niche content for discovery.
• Finally, Louis mentioned that in order to blog about new content, often the top priority is good old fashioned networking.

Gabe Rivera

Twitter - FriendFeed

• Gabe Rivera uses Techmeme for selecting the best of what is out there.
• He described that Techmeme is based on an automated system that relies primarily on links between clustered stories to determine how much a story should be ranked, but has recently introduced a 'human element' in the form of Megan McCarthy, the new editor for the site.
• Marshall added that Gabe has some non-tech Techeme-style link blogs, like Memeorandum and Ballbug.
• Gabe says entering new content areas is often difficult because an aggregator needs both fresh content and good metadata to be able to aggregate effectively.

Micah Baldwin

Twitter - FriendFeed

• Micah says he often starts searching for new content by going to one of his favorite, most trusted bloggers, and then searching outward from there. He mentioned that there are a lot of tools to help with this, and Lijit is just one of them.
• As an example, he highlighted a Lijit-powered blog aggregator called Securitybloggers, but he also stresses that influence of a blogger is important. Take recommendation + expertise and you will find new content.
• He said that the I Can Has Cheezburger (ICHC) folks are always looking for the next big meme. A natural place to find new memes is applications like Friendfeed.
• Micah mentioned that ICHC just acquired Twittypic to create Son of a Tweet, a tool that leverages Twitter for finding funny pictures.

Melanie Baker

Work Twitter - Personal Twitter - FriendFeed

• Melanie, in her role as community manager, gets her information from many sources but uses her company's product PostRank to filter stories by buzz and popularity.
• PostRank (formerly called AideRSS) is a system that measures engagement surrounding blog posts by tracking references on over 15 different social media sites, including site comments, Digg, FriendFeed, Furl, Twitter and more.
• Melanie says there are plenty of communities out there to draw from, from her perspective of blogs that use PostRank and Lijit.

Wrap Up

The audience asked what this process of discovering and collecting new sources of content online might be called. After a bit of discussion, the panelists decided the term curation works well, followed by trusted discovery and trusted recommendations.

Overall, we thought the panel exposed those listening to tips and techniques that, while part of a seasoned social media worker's toolkit, may not be leveraged as effectively by newcomers or light social media users.

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/sxsw_panel_beyond_aggregation.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/sxsw_panel_beyond_aggregation.php Tue, 17 Mar 2009 16:57:31 -0800 Phil Glockner RSS analystics service PostRank.com is putting out a call to feed publishers for feature requests for a new service that will aim to replace the near-dead FeedBurner. The company's initial proposal looks far, far cooler than anything FeedBurner ever did - but after a Google acquisition turned Feedburner from every blogger's best friend into an unreliable annoyance, it's hard not to be cynical.

PostRank is one of our very favorite services on the web today. Give it any RSS feed and the service will give you a filtered feed of just the most commented on, linked to, saved and Dugg posts from that feed. It's really handy, so we're excited to see what the company can do moving more seriously into the feed publishing and analytics market. Can PostRank pull it off? Below we discuss reasons why they may or may not be able to do so.

]]>Sponsor

]]> We use PostRank every day here at ReadWriteWeb, for everything from finding the weirdest stuff on the internet to tracking the hottest conversation among GenY, semantic web or mobile blogs.

The company says it "will be releasing a collection of products over the period of next six months related to [feed analytics]: helping publishers and readers discover topic experts and measure their influence, engagement analytics (social media analytics), real-time tracking and other tools to help publishers and readers find and read what matters."

Can They Pull it Off?

The main asset PostRank has going for it is that there's a very clear value proposition. We've found that it takes one sentence to explain what this service does and nearly anyone who uses RSS immediately grasps the value of the application and wants it. That's quite remarkable considering how hard it is to explain most things about RSS.

FeedBurner got huge piles of users by saying "go through us and we'll tell you how many RSS subscribers you have." PostRank can tell potential users "go through us and we'll tell you what your hottest posts are, who the most loved writers are in your field and what topics are burning up the charts." And hopefully, how many subscribers you have.

The Challenges PostRank Will Face

There are a lot of challenges that PostRank will face in trying to replace FeedBurner.

Will Google Reader, now the dominant RSS reader by far, report subscriber numbers to PostRank? FeedBurner requires RSS readers to report numbers daily, something that doesn't always work. Now that FeedBurner is owned by Google, will they hand over their huge part of the numbers to a competitor?

Far more processing power is required to count comments, inbound links, etc. for every blog post in an RSS feed. When PostRank came out with a Google Reader and Newsgator plug-in, for example, it limited its filtering to just the most popular 1,000 blogs on the web.

It's more complicated to evaluate "social media engagement" than it is subscribers, and subscribers is fairly complicated itself. How many people are still mystified by the way FeedBurner numbers rise and fall daily, or by the obtuse "reach" metric that FeedBurner now emphasizes? Similarly, PostRank appears fairly transparent on the surface, but a closer look at their metrics leaves us feeling more in the dark than we'd like to be.

It hasn't been a bump-free ride so far, either. Feed URL irregularities, caching strategies that didn't work out, server troubles - we find ourselves contacting PostRank on a regular bases to report problems. We also subscribe to the feed of their GetSatisfaction forum and we know we're not the only ones. In their defense, the company has raised more money lately and so could be better prepared for the load. This author also used PostRank on a major public production for a large consulting client 6 months ago and that worked quite well.

Finally, will publishers trust another 3rd party feed publishing service to stand between them and their readers? Some blogs have reported no problems of late with FeedBurner, but a quick search on Twitter shows that many others have.

We're excited to see what PostRank can do, though. If you are too, drop by the company's new Feed Analytics page and share your ideas and feature requests for a feed analytics service of the future.

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/postrankcom_aims_to_replace_feedburner.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/postrankcom_aims_to_replace_feedburner.php Blogging Mon, 26 Jan 2009 11:57:53 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick We love Canadian startup PostRank here at ReadWriteWeb, but today the company has really outdone itself with the release of a powerful and eye catching new widget to display your blog's hottest posts.

PostRank scores every item in your (or any) RSS feed, by number of comments, inbound links, saves in Delicious, mentions on Twitter, votes on Digg, etc. It then offers a filtered view or feed of the most relatively popular posts in that feed. The new top posts widget offers powerful new functionality, can be customized and installed in less than a few minutes and looks really hot.

]]>Sponsor

]]> The widget offers not just the top posts but also lets readers perform a search of your blog, view and subscribe to just the most popular posts containing those keywords. You want an RSS feed of just the most popular posts on ReadWriteWeb about mobile apps, or the semantic web, or politics? This new widget will give you one in seconds. You can even do searches like: mobile -semantic.

Some publishers might hesitate to let users easily subscribe to such a filtered feed from their site - but those are often people who wouldn't subscribe at all if you didn't give them such a personalized option.

We've embedded the widget below - give it a try and you'll see what a powerful experience it offers.

The new widget also comes with a WordPress plug-in that will display each post's Postrank score in your WordPress dashboard. That's pretty hot.

Using this widget out of the box is really easy and it should fit nicely on your blog's sidebar. Unfortunately changing the size of the widget to put it anywhere else is a real pain - you can see all the white space above. It made us quite angry, in fact! The company said there was a bug that should be fixed promptly though, so hopefully all problems will be solved. There really are too few customization options. It would also be nice to be able to hover over the post rank numbers and see a popup of criteria for that score as well, as you can on the main site.

That minor frustration aside, we're very impressed with this new widget's speed and functionality. We expect to see it on a lot of blog sidebars around the web soon.

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/postrank_releases_gorgeous_new.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/postrank_releases_gorgeous_new.php Widgets Wed, 17 Dec 2008 07:51:18 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick RSS and syndication are the veins that the new social web flows through. Countless products and services have been built on top of RSS in the past few years but there are always a few that stand above the rest.

As part of this year's Top 10 Products series, we offer below the Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008. These are the feed tools we and the people we know use day in and day out - we love them, we hate them, we wouldn't want to work without them.

]]>Sponsor

]]> This is the fourth in our series of top products of 2008:

1. Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008
2. Top 10 International Products of 2008
3. Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008

About the Selections

These aren't all new products from 2008. They are the products in the RSS and syndication world that we think made the biggest impact or were the most useful.

To be honest, this was not a particularly good year for innovation in the RSS space. Too many of the products listed below are incumbents, several of which drove us crazy this year. They remain on the list, however, because they are incredibly useful and nothing topped them.

Some honorable mentions are deserved as well. We talked to many people who like RSS magazine-style start page Feedly, though we found it overly constrictive and don't feel that it's made a big market splash yet. We also found the Associated Press's AP Member Marketplace very interesting. Had we gotten a chance to get to know it better, it could very well have been on this list. Finally, we love African social media aggregator Afrigator - it's a great way to learn about what's happening all over the continent and it's a great use of RSS. We named it one of the Top 10 International Products of 2008 but we think it deserves an honorable mention in this category as well.

And Now the RWW Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008

Postrank

Formerly known as AideRSS, Postrank is simply the most useful RSS related application we've seen in a long time. Plug in any RSS feed and Postrank will rate each item in the feed on a scale of 1 to 10, by number of comments, inbound links, saves in Delicious, etc. You can then subscribe to a filtered feed of just the 10% most popular items in that feed.

We use Postrank all the time, in all kinds of contexts: from monitoring break-out stories in niche markets we don't follow closely, to finding out about the bread and butter of new blogs we discover to running search feeds through Postrank to surface hot conversations on any topic.

Postrank has been around for about a year and a half, but we write about it over and over again.

This year Postrank opened an API, made a bunch of deals with other companies, improved its service, raised a round of funding and just generally rocked.

FriendFeed

Social "life streaming" service FriendFeed is making syndication a more social activity than anything else has yet. The service aggregates your activity data from all around the web, lets your friends comment on it and shows you the activities of all your friends' friends when someone you know comments on something and exposes it to their network.

If RSS readers will change your life and work through their awesome usefulness, FriendFeed is a service that makes syndication fun. It's one of the first places we go on the web every morning.

We interviewed the ex-Googlers who founded FriendFeed last February and that interview is still the best place to learn how the service works under the hood.

If you'd like to connect with the ReadWriteWeb crew on FriendFeed (and we hope you will) we've posted a tour of our FriendFeed profile pages here. Please join us also in the ReadWriteWeb FriendFeed Room.

Gnip

Gnip is a social media ping server, a service that other services ask for user data updates from all around the web. There's nothing here for users, but almost every developer we talk to these days who is aggregating content in order to add value to it (and that is the name of the game) has Gnip on its radar. The company aims to make aggregation more timely, scalable and efficient than it is today.

We wrote about Gnip at length when the service launched in July.

Snackr

Snackr is a simple little RSS ticker built in Adobe AIR. Its frenetic and unstopping delivery of news is too much for many people, but the rest of us love it. It's where our eyes wander during page loads and other down times. Many of the stories you read here at ReadWriteWeb were based on things we first caught wind of through Snackr.

Snackr was built in-house at Adobe by Flex team member Narciso Jaramillo. We reviewed it in May and have been using it ever since.

Google Reader

Google Reader is the market leader in full featured RSS readers, having pulled ahead of the troubled Bloglines in recent months. This year Google Reader has made their sharing feature much more transparent, added the ability to translate any feed into a number of different languages and recently redesigned.

It hasn't been a super exciting year for the product, and there are still basic problems like very infrequent caching of rare feeds, but Google Reader's incredible dominance in the field makes it a required part of this list.

Google Reader RSS Subscriber Count Greasemonkey Script

One of the simplest little changes we've made to our browsers lately is the addition of this greasemonkey script that shows the number of readers in Google Reader that any page's RSS feed has. You can usually multiply that number by 2 to 4 times for an estimate of how many total readers a feed has across all readers, but either way it's a great little indication of a site's popularity.

The script was written by an anonymous user named "uncv" and we'd like to thank them. We love what they've done! This was one of the 7 coolest browser tweaks from the last month that we wrote about earlier this week. It's already won a permanent place in our hearts!

Dapper

Dapper.net is a point and click interface for data extraction - a nice way to say scraping an RSS feed. We continue to depend on Dapper for all kinds of research, we're always finding new ways to use it around here. We love it.

Unfortunately, some sites don't like us to have access to links back to them available in our RSS readers (like Facebook, for example) and that really upsets us. In many cases those feeds that we created ourselves are the only way we'd be drawn back to a site, so it's their loss as much as ours.

Dapper has been around since 2006, but they recently launched a semantic ad platform that we included in our list of the top 10 semantic web products of 2008.

Twitterfeed

Love it or hate it, Twitterfeed has made a big impact on the web in 2008. It's the service people use to publish an RSS feed right into Twitter.

Some people argue that twitter is all about conversation and that publishing an RSS feed there is grating and inappropriate. We like getting our local newspaper story links on Twitter, though, and everything from disaster monitoring to traffic conditions are now available via Twitterfeed.

Feedburner

Google's RSS publishing service Feedburner hurt our ability to break news first, can't be used in many corporate environments because it gets blocked in China and only made 6 posts all year to its company blog, none since May. That's compared to 28 posts in 2007. Apparently once you get your Google money there's not much point in communicating with the people who depend on you every day.

Why would we call Feedburner one of the top 10 RSS products on the year then? Because despite how frustrating it can be, the service is still so incredibly useful that we don't know what we'd do without it. Not just for publishing and analytics for ReadWriteWeb feeds - from numbers to email delivery to FeedFlare links, Feedburner will work magic easily on any feed you work with. I've got 68 different feeds in my account and I'll probably publish several more before the year is up.

Pipes

Yahoo! Pipes is another RSS based service that is really frustrating, hasn't innovated substantially in the last year - but is still so powerfully useful that it deserves a spot as one of the top products in this market.

Splicing and filtering RSS feeds is the simplest thing to do with Pipes, but there's much more you can do with it as well. It's great for us pseudo-geeks, we can work all kinds of magic with it. We've used Pipes throughout the year to do things that we (ok I) don't have the technical chops to do otherwise. For that I thank the Pipes team a whole lot.

Those Were Our Favorites This Year - How About You?

Did we miss anyone you think should have been on this list? We hope you'll share your favorites in comments below. What RSS and syndication products impacted you the most in 2008?

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_10_rsssyndication_products_of_2008.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_10_rsssyndication_products_of_2008.php 2008 in Review Thu, 11 Dec 2008 15:30:30 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick Popular Firefox addon Read It Later has just introduced an updated version of their plugin which adds new functionality to Google Reader. With the new extension, which now works in both Firefox and IE, you can now get through your RSS feeds faster by checking off the items you want to read later in more detail. You can then access those saved items from any web browser, whether it's Firefox at home, IE at work, or even your iPhone.

]]>Sponsor

]]> The updated Read It Later extension adds a Greasemonkey-esque feature to your Google Reader feed list that places a check mark next to your feed items to the right of the star. As you go through your feeds, the posts you check will be automatically added to your reading list - the saved list of items you can access at anytime at readitlaterlist.com. With the extension's included offline functionality, you can also queue up a number of articles to read when you know you're going to be away from the net - like when you're on a plane trip, for example.

When managing your reading list through the bookmarklet, you now have more options as well. You can view your list as either "normal" or "condensed," select how many items to show per page, open the list in the sidebar, and enable or disable various context menus and additional toolbar buttons.

However, the best feature to come to your reading list is the ability to sort it by PostRank. This functionality, formerly called AideRSS, is something we've been big fans of here at RWW for some time. With PostRank enabled, your reading list is intelligently filtered by popularity. Posts are scored in several ways, including number of comments it received, number of times it's been tagged in Del.icio.us, number of diggs, and how many inbound links it has received. So now, you can read your list in order of importance, an especially useful feature for those suffering from information overload.

Other improvements like updated privacy controls and tweaks to existing features round out this latest release, making Read It Later a great addition to your browser whether that's Firefox or IE. Now all we need is an iPhone bookmarklet and we'll be all set.

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/read_it_later_comes_to_google_reader.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/read_it_later_comes_to_google_reader.php Products Thu, 30 Oct 2008 05:55:00 -0800 Sarah Perez AideRSS, the marvelous service that filters items in any RSS feed for popularity with readers, has spun out its core technology PostRank as an Application Programing Interface (API) for integration into any other application. We love a good API here at RWW and hope to see some really interesting uses of this one.

PostRank looks at every item that comes through an RSS feed and scores it on a scale of 1 through 10 based on the number of comments it's received, inbound links, saves to del.cio.us, times it's been Tweeted and Dugg. The excitement comes in when the service delivers a filtered feed of just the 15% "most popular" items in that feed. It's a great way to pay casual attention to prolific feeds when you just want to see its own highlights.

]]>Sponsor

]]> Smaller blogs can still score high by getting an unusually high number of comments, etc. relative to the other posts in their feed.

Today the company is rolling out a slew of performance enhancements and new metrics including clickthroughs from its extensions, bookmarks in Ma.gnolia and mentions on microblogging service Pownce.

The company also rolled out a dedicated page for its very handy Google Reader extension - GReader users should check this one out.

We use AideRSS here at RWW every day and can't say enough about this simple but powerfully useful tool. We've written about it numerous times, including in the following particularly popular posts:

• Want That Post to Go Popular? Here's the Best and Worst Times to Post It


• What's Next on the Web: A ReadWriteWeb Toolkit for 2008


• How to Find the Weirdest Stuff on the Internet


• Comparing Six Ways to Find Top Blogs in Any Niche


• Ten Common Objections to Social Media Adoption and How You Can Respond


• Seven Tips for Making the Most of Your Feed Reader


• Why Gen Y is Going to Change the Web


• Five Ways You Can Fall in Love With Tagging Again


• An Ode to RSS On RSS Appreciation Day


• Why Online "Noise" is Good for You

It's true, we love AideRSS. It's just so incredibly useful we can't get over it. We wish the algorithm for determining popularity was more transparent and we hope that today's performance enhancements make a big difference - but we love it none the less. We'd love to see the folks at AideRSS connect with the good people at Gnip, a social media pinging service plus that we wrote about here.

The prospect of AideRSS's PostRank being rolled into other applications around the web is an exciting one. In what contexts would you like to see just the most popular items in an RSS feed?

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/postrank_filters_your_info.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/postrank_filters_your_info.php Attention Thu, 10 Jul 2008 08:55:25 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick